If it’s wagyu, the answer is everywhere: in upscale supermarkets and on countless menus around town. So, where did this unlikely combination of muscle and ephemera come from?

SOME MACHO DIE-HARDS in the United States are proposing turning March 14 into a holiday for men to provide an antidote to the roses-and-chocolates froufrou of St Valentine’s Day. If “Beefsteak and BJ Day” ever takes off, it will certainly reinforce the notion of chewy, bloody beef as a man’s ideal food.

Where does that put wagyu, the tinkerbell of the bovine world? Wagyu is beef so tender that it doesn’t just melt in the mouth, it disappears. You don’t need a knife, you don’t need a fork, you really don’t even need teeth. “It is all about the fat,” says Dan Segall, executive chef of contemporary Japanese restaurant Zuma.

Wagyu is a traditional beef from Japan, although talk about tradition is slightly misleading: beef is a relative newcomer to the Japanese diet. Wagyu cows have been bred in Japan for just under 150 years, when, for unknown reasons, the largely Buddhist Japanese started craving steak. (Buddhists who eat meat often still have a dislike for eating larger animals or their blood.)

Using their well-known ability to take Western ideas, improve them out of all recognition and brand them as distinctively their own, the Japanese crossbred fi ve Asian breeds of cow with the famed Angus cattle of Scotland, canada and the US. the result is black-haired, large-framed cattle that put weight on easily, can eat grass or grain and have spectacular marbling – lines of fat weaving through the muscle that give the meat its extraordinary fl avor and succulence. » next